CLASS
and the Evangelical Church in England
By Kirsten Birkett
Church Society. 115 pages. £5
ISBN 978 1 739 516 079
Kirsten Birkett makes good use of two recent books by Natalie Williams and Mez McConnell to show that the evangelical church has not been very effective in reaching working-class people.
The author is a middle-class Australian theologian, who has spent the past 18 years in the UK, and now works for Church Society. Birkett explores what it means to be working class, concluding it has a lot to do with how we feel rather than a set of fixed criteria like accent, job and home.
The book defends the predominantly middle-class church while urging it to try to understand how other people think. She suggests that this involves a lot of listening and trying to understand and navigate differences between classes. This includes issues like how we communicate what we are thinking, and developing empathy for working-class people who seek to enter the strange new world of church and theological education.
I leave you with an interesting challenge from the book: ‘There is a cost to following Jesus, and part of comfortable middle-class Christianity is to make that cost invisible for middle-class Christians … perhaps we need to challenge the unconscious greed and selfish ambition that is so comfortably accepted in evangelical churches.’ Ouch!
